Greg Grandin Quotes

It's well proved economics that if a country which is rich and a country that is poor come together in global trade, sooner or later the standard of living of the poor country will go up towards that of the rich country.

If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.

The Secretary General has endorsed a propaganda exercise for international finance institutions whose policies are widely held to be at the root of many of the most grave social problems facing the poor all over the world.

The biggest single thing that has lifted people out of poverty is free trade.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

In Southeast Asia the world is understood to be a vast, complex network of interdependent relationships. So when global capitalism makes it impossible for small-time rice farmers to feed their families and make a living, it is a natural thing for anyone in the family who can find an alternative source of income to do so.

One of the things that Africa needs, everybody seems to agree, is some measure of debt relief.

Diamonds are a key component in the campaign to make poverty history.

Globalization and the neoliberal economic model have already been rejected in Latin America; it simply hasn't been a solution for our people. At the same time, Latin countries like Venezuela and Argentina are anti-imperialist and anti-globalization, and yet their economies are growing again.

The global policy shift toward neo-liberalism that took place during the 1980s and 1990s was supposed, according to its proponents, to bring a convergence of living standards of richer and poorer nations. This never actually happened.

The move towards neoliberalism in Britain was intimately bound up with the embrace of the U.S. as the country to be aped and copied.

During the 1990s the United States sought to impose the 'Washington Consensus' on Latin American governments. It embodied what Latin Americans call 'neo-liberal' principles: budget cuts, privatization, deregulation of business, and incentives for foreign companies. This campaign sparked bitter resistance and ultimately collapsed.

There has long been a debate in the aid community and in Africa about how to most effectively help situations of poverty in developing nations and underprivileged communities.

Obama remains frozen in his father's time machine. His anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of Africa in the 1950s: state confiscation of land, confiscatory taxation, and so on. My anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of India in the 21st century.

There were times when there were riots in Africa, demonstrations against the IMF because of the policy advice they were giving, the conditionalities they were imposing, and the difficulties that arose out of the implementation of those conditionalities.

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

Too many African countries have already hit rock-bottom - ungoverned, poverty-stricken, and lagging further and further behind the rest of the world each day; there is nowhere further to go down.

Many on the right confuse the "is" of globalization with the "ought" of simply accepting all its effects. They preach a political quietism that is really just a cloak for greed.

When you liberalize trade, benefits go to capital and away from labor.

The people are rejecting so-called free trade and globalization that the elites presented as a positive thing.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

I'd say putting another Clinton in the White House is only going to make that right-wing extremism greater. We will see more of these neoliberal policies, like Wall Street deregulation, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Hillary has always supported. She's changed her tune a little bit, but Hillary has walked the walk.

The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling.

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

Those memories of living in a developing nation are part of who I am today and give me a profound understanding of the challenges of economic development - an understanding which will make my tenure as Peace Corps director, I hope, a very special one.